New Sulzbacher Center chef ready for large task of running it like a business

David Davis (from left) and Mark Wisniewski, volunteers from BBVA Compass, help Sulzbacher Center executive chef Kurt D'Aurizio serve meals at the center on Thursday. D'Aurizio has to spend a lot of time on the business end of his job as well as on the food preparation.

Kurt D'Aurizio served pizza bagels, soup and salad at the Sulzbacher Center on Thursday, on August 7, 2014, in Jacksonville. Kurt D'Aurizio joined the Sulzbacher Center as their new Executive Chef and Kitchen Manager recently.

The staff and volunteers in the Sulzbacher Center kitchen could be seen Wednesday darting back and forth as they prepared the main meal for a lunch that included a cold pasta mixed with salmon and tuna.

In his office on the second floor just above the kitchen, newly hired executive chef Kurt D’Aurizio was taking a brief respite from kitchen duties, though he could still watch the action from a video monitor on his desk that offered him a bird’s-eye view of the kitchen at the nonprofit center that helps the needy.

With about hundreds of meals to prepare morning, noon and night, D’Aurizio said he’s constantly connected to the central production area at the facility in downtown Jacksonville on Adams Street.

“From a cooking perspective, one of the fun things is we get to be creative every day,” said D’Aurizio, clad in a black chef’s smock, a cooking thermometer sticking out of a pocket on his left sleeve. “It’s energetic, it’s ever changing.”

D’Aurizio was hired by the homeless shelter and kitchen about a month ago. He comes from a commercial restaurant background after his most recent post in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He said he handled mass serving environments before as corporate chef for 20 restaurants owned by the Divine Dining Group.

He held that post for six years until 2011. He then moved to Jacksonville where he’s been a food consultant with various restaurants, groups and caterers. He became event director in October for Slow Food First Coast, the local chapter of an international nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable food products.

D’Aurizio has been married to his wife, Allison, for 23 years and the couple has a 16-year-old son who is about to start classes at Stanton College Preparatory High School and an 11-year-old daughter who is home-schooled.

D’Aurizio lives in the Springfield historic district and he plans on starting a community farmers market in his neighborhood in the fall.

D’Aurizio acknowledged he needs his full cooking and business acumen to manage the Sulzbacher Center food demands, which are constantly changing.

The center provides assistance for the homeless with daily meals, shelter and job placement among other services. Sulzbacher officials estimate about 3,000 people seek some kind of assistance from the center each day. The food aspect of the operation is a major expenditure accounting for $1.3 million of the annual expenses, which have amounted to $9.2 million used so far this year.

D’Aurizio said he tries to plan menus a week in advance, but as donations of food from area restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses come in, he has to remain creative.

“My focus is to be in the kitchen as much as I can,” said D’Aurizio, 46. “It’s important for me to spend time with the staff and the resident volunteers and volunteer groups because that’s where it happens.”

D’Aurizio said cooking got him into the business. But he said he’s learned to use his business skills to deal with large-scale feeding. He said he majored in food management at the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Food, Hotel and Tourism Management in Rochester, N.Y., and that helped prepare him for his new task.

“The business side of it has always been part of it for me,” D’Aurizio said. “Frankly, for me it comes more easily than it does to some chefs.”

Throughout his career, D’Aurizio said he’s seen lots of chefs master the art of cooking. That’s not the problem. It’s the business management aspect of being a top chef that often is the pitfall for many of his colleagues.

“Some of these chefs had a really hard time with that [management aspect]. They had a hard time with writing a schedule or filling out an order guide or just some of the basic systems,” D’Aurizio said.

“They could be very creative. They could be cooking and producing beautiful food. But you don’t always get the whole package with the creativity and business smarts. For me, it’s always been part of the game, I guess,” D’Aurizio said.

That managerial aspect is what holds together the Sulzbacher food programs. This year the center also offers meal delivery service to other organizations, which is actually a business that raises capital for the center. The facility is also bringing back a cookie production for-profit operation during the holidays, and D’Aurizio will oversee that as well.

Cindy Funkhouser, president and CEO of the Sulzbacher Center, said D’Aurizio’s business sense was a major consideration when the organization hired him.

“It’s quite challenging from a management standpoint and from a quality control standpoint,” Funkhouser said. “It’s actually quite complicated because we order food on a weekly basis.

“We wait to see what we’re going to get from the food banks. Then we supplement that with the amount of food that we need. …” Funkhouser said.

The center’s approach to running the food operation matches the paradigm laid out by many culinary institutions for the ideal executive chef, said Stephen Hengst, director of communications for the Culinary Institute of America.

Hengst said D’Aurizio is following a culinary plan called “mise en place” – French for having everything in place.

“By having your mise en place prepared in advance, that’s ordering the right ingredients, setting up the right standards of service, making sure you have the right team in place to serve that much volume and making sure you have the right facility and setup for your kitchen to serve that much food, those are all things that a chef needs to think through,” said Hengst, who is a graduate of the culinary institute.

“Part of it is just cooking the food. But the rest of it is: How do you purchase it? How do you acquire it? How do you prepare it? How do you cook it? And how do you serve it to that many people? There’s a whole process that you have to go through to do that successfully,” Hengst said.

Most culinary schools offer training for large-scale cooking and food preparation. Hengst said his institute has a class in quantity food productions and that usually applies to chefs who work for cruise lines, caterers and extensive banquet preparations, for instance. Hengst said the scale that the Sulzbacher Center serves is larger than most restaurants and it’s a daunting challenge for anyone to handle.

“What a lot of people don’t understand is that nowadays, being a chef is a lot more than just knowing how to cook food,” Hengst said. “You can imagine it’s difficult to produce that much food that quickly and on a budget. … Unless you understand it and the business side of being a chef inside and out, it’s very difficult to be successful.”

There are guidelines for the meals at the Sulzbacher Center that include protein levels and they don’t use all the produce that’s donated. D’Aurizio said they never turn down donations, but sometimes don’t use all the food that’s given to the facility because it may have spoiled or doesn’t fall under the nutritional guidelines. The administrators at the center are careful not to offend the donors and never tell them their donations are unacceptable.

“We do have to monitor the food that comes in the door to make sure it is up to standards of what we want to serve. I don’t want to sound snooty, but if we get in some lettuce and half the bag is spoiled, we’re not going to serve it,” D’Aurizio.

Funkhouser said D’Aurizio is in a position to facilitate growth at the center and his background should prove a good fit for that objective.

“There’s a lot of moving parts in the kitchen and as we continue to grow our for-profit piece of that, we need someone who has experience in restaurants and in the for-profit world to be able to manage the kitchen, the products and the quality that we need to put out,” Funkhouser said.